Facebook: Dead and Gone or Alive and Well?

It’s been two weeks since The Conversation published its report claiming that Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) as a social network is “dead and buried,” but some are still not willing to let the argument go. Following The Conversation’s ”Facebook’s so uncool, but it’s morphing into a different beast,” Quartz published a scathing rebuke of the report on Monday, calling the story an “inaccurate report that goes viral on social media before the accurate version has a chance to catch up.”

It all started when Daniel Miller, the professor of material culture at University College London who penned The Conversation’s story, reported his findings that young people now use other social media outlets like Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) instead of Facebook because their parents are crowding them out of Mark Zuckerberg’s social network. Miller wrote, “What we’ve learned from working with 16-18 year olds in the UK is that Facebook is not just on the slide, it is basically dead and buried.” It took only seconds for the controversial report to hit the Internet and earn retweets and reposts globally.

Not many go up against the social media behemoth that is Facebook, so the results of The Conversation’s study were certainly news — big news. Unfortunately, what Quartz relayed Monday is that not all news is legitimate news, and publication enlisted the help of a Pew Research study to show just how shallow many of The Conversation’s claims really turn out to be.